Earlier today, the Wall Street Journal published evidence that Google has been circumventing the privacy settings of Safari and iPhone users, tracking them on non-Google sites despite Apple's default settings, which were intended to prevent such tracking.

This tracking, discovered by Stanford researcher Jonathan Mayer, was a technical side-effect—probably an unintended side-effect—of a system that Google built to pass social personalization information (like, “your friend Suzy +1'ed this ad about candy”) from the google.com domain to the doubleclick.net domain. Further technical explanation can be found below.

"Israeli spy gear sent to Iran via Denmark," reads the headline from Israeli paper YNet News. Today, yet another breaking story of a high-tech company selling spyware to an authoritarian regime emerged. As a detailed report by Bloomberg News' Ben Elgin--who has made a name for himself this year reporting on the surveillance industrial complex--explains, Israeli company Allot Communications Ltd. clandestinely sold its product NetEnforcer to Iran by way of Denmark.

Last week, the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA), as association of 6 online advertising groups1, published a set of Self-Regulatory Principles for Multi-Site Data. These principles are designed to cover data collection above and beyond the standards the group adopted for behavioral advertising.

If you were inspired to support digital civil liberties this afternoon, you may have noticed that EFF's donation pages look different. The information you enter will now wind its way to an EFF-hosted server and populate a local installation of the first-class, open source database management product for nonprofits, CiviCRM. EFF is proud to join a growing cadre of activist organizations using CiviCRM and will continue contributing to its ongoing success.